GQ magazine: The Bible is "foolish" and "ill-intentioned"

The Bible's been around for centuries but GQ magazine is like, eh? What's so great about it? Instead of Scripture, it has a fiction recommendation for you.

The Good Book makes the mag's list of "21 Books You Don't Have to Read." While allowing "there are some good parts," the post warns that it's "repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned."

Instead, GQ suggests, how about "The Notebook?" It's billed as "a marvelous tale of two brothers who have to get along when things get rough."

The Bible, on the other hand, is full of brothers who did not always get along so well. Jacob and Esau were rivals from the start. Cain murdered Abel. Joseph's brothers were literally the worst. They threw him in a well, sold him into slavery and told their father he died. That one did have a happy ending, though, and inspired a hit musical and the powerful Dolly Parton ballad that provided the creative base for two locally filmed television movies, "Coat of Many Colors," and "Christmas of Many Colors."

The Bible finds itself in the company of works by J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway on the list of books GQ is just not that into. "Catcher in the Rye" is dinged as being "without any literary merit whatsoever." "Huckleberry Finn" is tedious, meandering and hamfisted. Hemingway's sentences? Too short.

Even Bram Stoker's "Dracula" makes the roster of books to skip. Here's the entire list , which includes contributions by various writers.

MORE: New Yorker magazine finds Chick-fil-A, Christianity "creepy"

The photos above and below are of my great grandmother's Bible BTW. She received it in 1888; GQ was not around back then.